Features
Busy as bees in a hive
The Urbana campus was all abuzz with bee news throughout the fall semester.
Entomology
professor Gene Robinson, quoted in the Washington Post, said that the honeybee
industry is at a critical juncture. “The time for action is now.”
A National Research Council study found that long-term population trends for some critical North American pollinators are not favorable, with an estimated 30 percent decline over 20 years in American honeybees. That's economically serious because bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the U.S. with an annual value of $10-20 billion.
While bats, butterflies and the wind contribute to pollination, bees are the wings-down pollination champs. The California almond crop, for example, requires 1.2 million bee hives to pollinate the 1.5 billion-pound annual crop. That's 80 percent of the world's almond supply with a yearly value of $2.5 billion.
Robinson is the G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology and director of Urbana’s bee research facility. He's not just concerned with big-crop, big-money bee issues. He's also co-leader of a group of scientists at other institutions who are sequencing the bee genome. Their work will shine new light in disciplines as disparate as human biology, neuroscience and gerontology.
Robinson has plenty of company right on the Urbana campus in the bee biz.
Fellow U of I entomologist Hugh Robertson is working on a genome-sequencing project and identified the family of honeybee chemoreceptors that deals with smell and taste.
Chemistry
professor Jonathan Sweedler is studying neuropeptides in bee brain cells
to better understand how the human brain works. Sweedler, a Lycan Professor
of Chemistry and the director of the Roy J. Carver Biotechnology Center,
has identified 36 genes and 100 neuropeptides in honey bee brains.
Computer
scientist Saurabh Sinha is studying the social behavior of bees. Sinha,
an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology, led a team that searched
the honey bee genome for clues for social cues, a form of bee pressure that
can cause bees to change jobs in response to needs of the hive.
The interdisciplinary buzz is getting louder.
Reporting by James E. Kloeppel, Urbana News Bureau
Learn more>> Inside
Illinois article on bee research in Urbana (PDF)